Elon Musk may be quick to claim credit for dismantling USAID, ripping up government contracts, and trimming the federal bureaucracy, but he wasn’t happy about the identities of his employees at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) getting leaked over the weekend.
Yesterday afternoon, WIRED revealed the names of six engineers in their teens and early twenties working for Musk at DOGE, none of whom have any high-level experience in the public sector.
After an anonymous account on X repeated those names in a post, Musk chimed in: “You have committed a crime,” he wrote ominously, without specifying a crime.
The account no longer exists. It's unclear if X—owned by Musk—removed it or the person behind the account deleted it.
The tech mogul’s MAGA-aligned followers rushed to his defense, arguing that publishing the names of the young DOGE employees amounts to “doxing” despite all six being adults charged with helping Musk to overhaul the executive branch.
“So DOGE turns off the spigot of billions of dollars being funneled to NGOs and their staff gets immediately doxxed?” one self-described astrophysicist asked in a post that racked up 168,000 views. “Thats a threat, right? Somebody is pissed that their snout has been pulled out of the trough and wants to intimidate the guys doing it.”
“Notice which public officials are chosen for doxing. It's not the ones engaging in corruption and graft, it's the good and young,” another commentator wrote on X. “These young men will have a target on their backs for the rest of their lives because they sought to serve their country.”
Even the Trump-appointed interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin got involved, publishing an open letter to Musk pledging his office would protect DOGE workers.
“I recognize that some of the staff at DOGE has been targeted publicly,” Martin wrote. “Let me assure you of this: we will pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.”
Some liberals have since posted unsavory threats on Reddit, which drew furious responses.
However, the outrage over identifying the group in the first place struck many commentators as bizarre given the longstanding convention of reporting on powerful government employees by name.
“this isn't some random grad student getting doxxed for saying weird shit on Twitter,” one observer wrote on X. “People have a right to know who's making important decisions about the federal budget”
“Knowing the names of the unelected oligarch’s underlings who are destroying the government from within is a crime now, apparently,” the official MeidasTouch account wrote on Bluesky.
Musk’s subordinates do seem to have an outsized role in executing DOGE’s agenda. Screenshots show the all-staff email announcing the closure of USAID’s headquarters this morning was sent by Gavin Kliger, one of the DOGE workers outed by WIRED.
As the names circulated in other publications and social media platforms today, Musk seemed to realize he couldn’t contain the spread of his staffers’ names.
Whether he actually believes naming Kliger and the others constituted “doxing” or even a crime, he changed his tune and defended his decision to staff DOGE with inexperienced coders.
“Time to confess: Media reports saying that @DOGE has some of world’s best software engineers are in fact true,” he wrote in a post on X this morning.
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